


ride or die, danvers

by alexdxnvers



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, and also I'm bad at naming individual oneshots so we're gonna stick them all in one place, basically all the oneshots because they're starting to become a mess all over my various profiles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-09-30 07:54:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10158008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexdxnvers/pseuds/alexdxnvers
Summary: A compilation of all my Sanvers oneshots from here on out (except for maybe the super, really long ones), just because it's going to be easier than having 50 individual oneshots on my page :)





	1. 1

Maggie thinks she knows what she’d let her girlfriend walk into, what she’d walked away from, that night (she’d helped Alex scrape together all the equipment they could get their hands on without raising any alarms, after all), but it takes a while for the knowledge of the actual scope of the situation to reach her.

It comes in the form of Winn, swinging by in place of Alex, who’s out on another CADMUS run, to drop intel off at the NCPD after the DEO’s finished going through it. The footage of the explosions pulled from security cameras on a building quite a distance away isn’t anything she hasn’t seen before, but the witness statements and incident reports? Even censored (Maggie’s given up that fight, because with the database leak she understands now more than ever how important it is that most non-essential alien information be kept on the down-low), there’s more details on the pages in front of her than what she’d heard recounted by Alex and Kara over drinks at the bar.

Winn realizes a second too late what he’s just handed Maggie, and is stammering for an excuse and backing towards the door before Maggie’s even finished reading through the first page.

Maggie had known that there were explosions, god, she’d pulled blueprints and helped Alex figure out where it would be best to place the bombs. Maggie didn’t know that Alex had just about rigged the place to collapse around her, didn’t know that she’d let Alex walk into a situation where she’d risk taking herself and Jeremiah out in a moment to bring Lillian Luthor down with them.

Maggie had known about the ship and the aliens and how they’d been been too slow to stop the vessel from launching, and she’d been told by an enthusiastic Kara and a slightly embarrassed Alex about how they’d worked to turn the ship around. Maggie didn’t know about the other part, the part where the controls were set to light-speed them across the universe, and she didn’t know how close she’d come to losing Alex, how close Kara had come to losing her sister, how close National City had come to losing their Supergirl if Kara had decided to keep her hold on the ship if it went, and maybe that’s why everyone’s been slightly more down than usual, because they all knew Kara might have made that choice in a heartbeat, even if it would have killed her.

But Maggie sinks into her chair slowly, her eyes still fixed on three words.

_Across the universe._

And Maggie lets herself imagine, for a moment, how she’d literally come seconds away from Alex ending up on the other side of the universe, more planets and stars than Maggie could even begin to name between them, and something inside her breaks a little, because _goddamnit_ , she wouldn’t have even known it happened it they hadn’t succeeded, not until Alex failed to come home, and she can’t stand the thought of all that distance between them forever, and she can’t stand the thought that she hadn’t even considered, sending Alex off after her father, that that might have been the last time she’d get to ever see her girlfriend.

Maggie Sawyer knows that she would sacrifice anything to save Alex Danvers, but the vastness of space and the distance of a whole universe would be the one thing she would never have been able to conquer, no matter how fucking hard she would have tried.

Alex is safe, and Alex is back at the DEO, and just this morning Alex’s hair was tickling Maggie’s nose when she woke up, skin warm and heart beating and oh so _alive_ , so Maggie has no idea why part of her heart’s suddenly breaking, and why after throwing down the files onto the clerk’s desk without a word she has to a go against the well-worn bag in the station’s gym until she’s sure her skin’s broken and bleeding under their sloppy wraps.

But Maggie can’t blame Alex for any of this, because Alex hadn’t lied. On any other occasion, with any one else, Maggie may have counted the omissions as being just as bad, but she knows Alex. Maggie knows that Alex genuinely hasn’t realized yet how close she came to serious trouble that night, because they got their aliens back and she ended the night curled around Maggie, so really, that’s the problem solved for Alex, even though that’ll probably change when Alex realizes how close she was to making Maggie lose her everything.

And Alex can tell, the moment Maggie walks into her apartment and drops her bag listlessly on the floor. Alex glances up from her book and sees the way Maggie curls into herself slightly when their eyes meet across the living room, and Alex sees the way Maggie quickly notes the distance between them, so small yet too much, so small yet something that was almost ripped away, and Alex rises quickly to cross the room and pull Maggie into her arms. Maggie doesn’t cry, but her arms slip around Alex’s waist and her fingers curl in Alex’s shirt, and Alex is more than happy to let her girlfriend press against her, to draw her arms around Maggie’s small frame and hold the detective close enough that Maggie can probably hear her heartbeat.

“I’m here, Maggie,” Alex whispers, feeling Maggie bury her face in the side of Alex’s neck. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.”

And, for the first time since Maggie opened the Exodus reports earlier this morning, with the feeling of Alex’s warm skin shifting under her touch, she believes it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My mind literally decided to throw the line “in a second you’ll be on the other end of the universe” or whatever the exact phrasing of that was at me at like, 11 pm after the episode, because naturally it took three hours for it to click that the universe is hella big and Maggie had no idea the whole time Alex was up there how close Alex came to literally just being gone and I just had a lot of emotions so whoops here it is. Listen: I'm studying astronomy rn and how big the universe is has always lowkey scared me but I've been completely all over the place with it this year, and throw in Sanvers and I'm just gone.
> 
> Anyways, hope you enjoyed, and my ask is always open over on tumblr at alexdxnverss for prompts and requests!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from tumblr: Oh oh! Can I request a sanvers fic where Alex is (strangely) traveling through time and seeing Maggie and herself (like older/younger versions of herself) at different points in their relationship? I've seen this idea with different couples but never sanvers. And would LOVE to see some smut and angst mixed in but I'm not sure if you're good writing that on a plane lol.

When Alex slams the alien over her shoulder into the ground and looks up, there’s a little girl standing in the middle of the mayhem. And maybe, maybe Alex should know better than to go over and try to get the little girl to safety when they’re surrounded by five hundred kinds of _weird_ , but eyes in an all too familiar shade of blue grab Alex’s attention, and everyone else, Maggie, Kara, J’onn, is otherwise occupied, too busy trying to get other civilians out to notice the child.

“Hey,” Alex says, holding her gun up slightly in her hands to not spook the little girl as she runs over. “Hey there, listen, where’s your mom? We need to get you out of here, okay?”

The girl looks up at her with wide eyes as Alex holds out her hand for the girl to take, and after a moment Alex relaxes as the girl gives a small smile and reaches out. It barely takes a second, though, for a strange feeling of _wrong wrong wrong_ to wash over her as the girl’s hand slips into hers, and all Alex has time to register is Maggie shouting her name before the sounds of the fighting disappear completely.

“Jesus,” Alex gasps, flinching automatically as cold rain hits her back. Her hand is empty, and as she turns around to look for the little girl, she realizes that it’s gone dark… and that she’s definitely not in National City anymore.

“Kara?” Alex calls, looking up at a flickering streetlight as she raises her gun. “Little girl?”

There’s the scuffled sound of something dragging along the sidewalk behind her and Alex whirls, retreating back into the shadows to watch.

Down the street, a small silhouette is making it’s way down the barely lit sidewalk towards Alex. For a moment, Alex thinks it’s the girl again, and she’s about to step forward when she clocks that this figure is a foot or so taller than the girl who’d been standing in National City with her just moments ago, and that she’s dragging a duffle bag behind her that looks way too big for her to carry comfortably. There’s a moment as Alex watches the girl where something thoroughly unsettling sweeps through her body, something about the girl sending up about a dozen red flags in Alex’s mind, and when the girl finally steps under a dim streetlight, Alex is suddenly glad that she didn’t step forward.

The girl disappearing from under the small pool of light? She’s someone Alex knows all too well.

“Maggie?” Alex says under her breath, and her mind whirls, because this isn’t the Maggie she knows. This is a Maggie who looks _years_ younger than Alex knows she is. Alex wants to laugh, she didn’t know Maggie could possibly get any smaller than she already is, but Maggie passes under another light closer to where Alex is hiding, and suddenly the pieces fall together when she sees how young she is, sees the hint of a jacket and jeans sticking out of her unzipped duffel bag, sees the devastated look on Maggie’s face.

This is the night that Maggie was outed. This is the night she was kicked out.

Alex is hit with the overwhelming urge to wander until she finds Maggie’s old house and slug Maggie’s dad for throwing out his daughter, but then everything else, the fact that she’s seeing something that happened over a decade ago, the fact that it’s night in Blue Springs when just seconds ago it was the middle of the day in National City, catches up to Alex and she forces herself to sit down hard between the bushes to stop and try to process. She doesn’t know what’s happened, doesn’t know how she’s seeing what she’s seeing and whether it’s real or just a vision. Alex wants nothing more than to run after Maggie and tug the young girl into her arms, but she has no information about what’s _happening_ , and she’s spent too long studying too many weird alien paradoxes and situations to know that sticking her nose in situations she doesn’t belong won’t end in anything good.

So Alex forces herself to stay put and watch Maggie walk away, back into the darkness, shoulders hunched almost all the way up to her ears, Alex pretends that there isn’t a tear tracing it’s way down her cheek as she sits and ignores the way the damp is seeping through her jeans, and Alex totally does’t almost scream when there’s a rustle in the bushes behind her.

Alex turns as quickly as she can wedged on the ground between to bushes to find herself looking straight into two bright blues eyes.

“You’re interesting,” the girl says, tilting her head to look at Alex.

“Well, you’re… definitely something,” Alex says after a moment, reassessing her initial opinion of the little girl she’d thought would be in need of saving. “How did you do that? What… what are you?”

The girl purses her lips for a second, and abruptly stands up.

“Hey,” Alex says, scrambling to her feet. “Hey, wait!”

Alex reaches out, making a grab for the girl’s hand. Her fingers wrap around a slim wrist as she stumbles, and when Alex rights herself again, she’s standing in the middle of a dimly lit alley.

The girl is gone again.

Alex barely has time to give the alley a quick glance over, a small smile lighting her face as she recognizes it, before a door comes crashing open near her. Alex jumps, and then her face heats up as she realizes who’s just tumbled out the back door of a bar and she quickly ducks behind a dumpster. Alex takes a quick moment to catch her breath, and slowly lifts her head in time to see herself push Maggie into a brick wall and tilt her head down to meet Maggie’s lips.

“What the _fuck_ is going on?” Alex whispers, eyes wide. The door opens again and Alex drops so fast that her ass slams into the ground almost painfully as Kara, Winn and James tumble into the alley, Kara making fake gagging noises a the sight of her sister and Maggie, while the boys start on a round of teasing. Alex forces herself to bite back a whimper of pain and level her breathing, praying that Kara’s distracted enough by their friends to not pick up on the sounds of an extra person living in the alley near them.

Alex waits until the sounds of herself and Maggie getting dragged off by the others fades before exhaling loudly, slumping against the dumpster and shoving her gun back into her holster. It’s hardly going to help her now.

First, backwards in time. Backwards to Maggie, trekking across Blue Springs and praying that her aunt lets her in the front door. And now forwards, to this bar that Alex and Maggie - Alex and Maggie, in her time? - had first visited just a few weeks ago, and Alex has no memory of hauling Maggie outside for a make out session, so this is definitely the future.

“Why are you doing this?” Alex asks, catching sight of the girl sitting on top of a stack of wooden delivery crates. “And are you ever going to tell me who you are?”

The girl barely reacts to Alex’s question, continuing to look at the agent with a level gaze. “You’re close to her.”

“Her?”

“ _Her.”_

Alex thinks for a second. “Kara, you mean? What does she have to do with this?”

The girl hops down from the boxes, landing gently in front of Alex and holding out her hand. “I want to go looking,” she says.

“Why me?” Alex shoots back. “You don’t even need me here, do you?”

“Come on,” the girl says insistently, and before Alex can snap her hand back, the girl’s latched on to her and then they’re standing hand in hand on a curved roof.

Alex recognizes the scene immediately, ignoring the way the little girl almost whoops besides her and scurries to the edge of the roof to let her legs dangle off the edge.

“There she is!” she says, pointing Kara in the distance out to Alex.

“Yeah,” Alex replies, folding her arms, but she’s too busy watching herself, watching how she catches sight of Maggie and the NCPD arriving on the scene. The girl might be occupied watching Supergirl, but Alex keeps her eyes trained on the herself of the past, down there on the airport tarmac staring down Maggie Sawyer for the first time. Alex wonders, now, looking back, how she hadn’t seen her pull towards the small detective from that first moment, wonders how she’d managed to hold that conversation at all without melting slightly under the force of Maggie’s gaze.

“Your jurisdiction ends where I say it does,” Alex echoes quietly, watching herself stalk away from Maggie. And she notices what she never saw the first time, the way that Maggie’s eyes follow her all the way across the tarmac until she disappears, and how the detective is in a bit of a daze until someone emerges from a cop car to talk to her.

Kara’s already flown off back to the DEO, and the little girl turns back to look at Alex.

“Do you want to see more?” she asks.

“I’m… I’m not sure if that would be a good thing, kid,” Alex replies.

The girl shrugs. “It’ll be fun,” she says, even though there’s a mischievous glint in her eye that Alex doesn’t quite trust.

“You’re going to bring me back to, you know, wher- when I was before, right?” Alex asks, because disappearing in the middle of a fight only to never turn up again probably would not be a good thing.

“Yeah, sure,” the girl says quickly. Alex has heard that tone from Kara, knows that it’s just being said to placate Alex and that there isn’t a guarantee of a follow-through on the statement, and Alex takes a few cautious steps back before discovering that apparently the girl doesn’t need to be touching her to bring her along for the time travel ride.

The kid is sprinting and tumbling out of the window before Alex can even blink (she quickly adds flight to the list of gifts that the girl possesses in her head). Lucky thing, though, because they’d appeared pressed up against one of the walls in her living room, and from where Alex is standing against the wall, she’s just out of sight from the bed’s occupants, but at the right angle to still be able to _see_ them.

And it’s a good thing that the girl is gone, because what Alex sees is definitely _not_ kid-appropriate.

Alex has spent years working for the DEO. She’s seen a lot of weird things, but seeing Maggie draped over her future (definitely future… maybe) self as not-really-but-also-real Alex surges up to meet her, tangling her fingers up in Maggie’s hair, definitely takes the prize. It’s not anything she hasn’t seen before, and, Alex considers, she’s just watching herself in bed. With her girlfriend. Except it’s not her, and it is, but this hasn’t _happened_ yet, and Alex wonders if the girl on the bed distracted by Maggie’s roaming hands remembers, knows that there’s someone in the room watching them, or if it just happens to be the last thing on her mind in the moment and is just a strand of a forgotten thought.

And truthfully, Alex knows that it’s very hard to really remember anything when Maggie’s fingers are tracing her skin and the small detective is looking down at her with wide, dark eyes.

That, and there’s the fact that they’re both somewhat oblivious messes when it comes to these moments, based off the ridiculous amount of times that it’s taken them way too long to realize that kara’s accidentally walked in on them, and that they don’t normally notice her presence until the younger Danvers knocks over a piece of furniture in her rush to exit unnoticed.

Still, Alex isn’t quite sure how long her luck will hold, and tries to block out the sounds of herself and Maggie about ten feet away because it’s really _not_ helping her think her way out of this. The girl, though, has chosen this moment to make her return, waving at Alex from just outside the open window. Alex eyes the two bodies on the bed and goes for it, blushing as she almost trips over Maggie’s shirt, and then she’s at the window and the two of them are gone.

The little girl seems to have a thing for just wanting to watch Supergirl go around National City, and a strange amount of this seems to overlap with Maggie and Alex. Alex tries not to watch too much, doesn’t want to accidentally find something out that she shouldn’t know, shouldn’t try to tamper with when she actually sees these things happen for the first time on her own. What she does do is watch herself and Maggie links arms and walk through the snow in the park, or laugh with the Superfriends on their way to the bar. They end up in the basement of the DEO one time, and Alex is scared for a moment that they’ll set off some kind of alarm, but then there’s the new distraction of the very familiar sound of Maggie’s moans coming from a supply closet near them, but the kid loses interest in the DEO subbasements the second she realizes Kara isn’t there, and they’re gone before Alex has to spend too much time thinking about the implications of sleeping with Maggie at the DEO (it’s not something she _hasn’t_ thought about, but there’s Kara with the superhearing and J’onn, who’s already told her off about keeping her thoughts about Maggie quieter, and Alex wonders what future her could possibly be thinking because the odds of them getting caught are absolutely ridiculous).

Alex is okay with these little snippets, these little snapshots of her life and Maggie’s, and to her credit, the kid seems to be keeping them away from any big, major events that Alex definitely doesn’t think she wants to see beforehand, things that she can wait to happen, that she’ll be able to enjoy the surprise of.

Then they’re in the middle of a crowd occupying the hallways looking down on the main level of the DEO and Alex’s heart just about stops in her chest before she realizes that here, no one can see them (whereas she’d just minutes ago been given a weird look by a group of teenagers for ducking behind a van to avoid being seen by herself and Maggie).

“What-” Alex turns to ask the girl, because she can feel the small hand nestled up against hers, but she stops as she catches sight of the stretcher being wheeled past the control room, and towards the narrow, underused hallway that leads to the morgue.

Alex stares at the scene, clocking the faces of agents around them, and finally spots J’onn standing by himself by the desks, a despair she’s rarely seen on him so evident on his face that it almost makes her take a step back. He’s definitely older here than the J’onn Alex knows, although god knows that could mean any number of years for the alien shapeshifter.

“No,” she whispers, trying to push her way through the crowd to get a better glimpse of the stretcher, the sheet drawn up to cover the body’s face. The crowd refuses to move, though, and the girl is completely still by Alex’s side.

Alex scans what little of the room she can see from her spot upstairs, but Winn’s desk is littered with his assorted collectibles, and James’s boots from his Guardian outfit sit next to the desk, where the two of them have taken to working on improvements during downtime. Alex’s heart lurches, because all she can think is _Kara Kara Kara_ , but the large red blip on the map behind them is still moving, speeding across the screen in the way Alex recognizes as Kara’s coping method when things get hard, when she doesn’t make it in time to save someone, when the only thing that can clear her head is impossibly fast laps around National City and quick sprints across the ocean to bring them back lunch from various cities in Europe.

So that leaves two people.

Herself.

And Maggie.

“Fuck,” Alex says, because she can’t make out how tall the covered body is from here, can’t see anything that might give it away, doesn’t see any indication of _when_ this even is, and she’s glad even as she fights the urge to break down, because god, Alex doesn’t want to know when this is coming, whether it’s next week or next year or one of them just dropping dead of natural causes decades from now.

Doesn’t want to think about death and her name and Maggie’s in the same sentence.

Doesn’t want to think about who’s body she wants it to be under that sheet.

Alex thinks of losing Maggie, thinks of the way her heart stops every time she gets hurt in the field, and Alex doesn’t know what she will do the day that she finally loses Maggie for good, the day she stops waking up to Maggie in bed and Maggie with her weird breakfast habits and Maggie dropping by the DEO every day at lunch to spend time with Alex and say hi to the gang. And then Alex thinks of Maggie losing her, Maggie having to watch her die, Maggie’s walls slamming back up the second Alex is gone, and she’s pretty sure she loses her ability to breathe because Alex inhales sharply and all she does is choke on the breath, double over at pain that isn’t real, and then her hand tightens around the little fingers in her grip and Alex spins the little girl around to look straight up at her.

“Take me back,” Alex hisses, struggling to get the words out, struggling to restrain herself from leaving bruises because this is just a _kid_ , even though Alex is sure by this point that there’s a lot more going on than she’s aware of.

Frankly, she doesn’t care anymore.

“But-”

“Take me back, take me _home,”_ Alex shouts. “Do it!”

And there’s more shouting, the desperation growing clearer and clearer with every word, and Alex’s stomach churns and she’s still in the DEO, but now she’s collapsing on the landing by the balcony, the setting sun outlining her figure, and she’s pretty sure someone screams, pretty sure that it’s Kara, but that doesn’t matter, because Maggie is there, Maggie’s there colliding straight into Alex and gripping the back of Alex’s shirt tightly. Alex squeezes back, hugs Maggie so hard that she’s sure it’s not comfortable, but she knows that this is real, doesn’t even care that the little girl is nowhere to be seen as she buries her nose in the side of Maggie’s neck.

“Jesus, Alex, don’t you ever fucking scare me like that again,” Maggie gets out in one breath. “Hours, Danvers, you were gone for _hours_ , you just disappeared, what on Earth happened-”

Kara’s there now, wrapping her arms around both Maggie and Alex and drawing them together almost uncomfortably tightly, but Alex can feel all three of them shaking, doesn’t mind at all. And Winn is asking questions, Maggie’s still going between expressing her relief and terror and chewing Alex out, and Kara just wants to hold her, it seems, and J’onn’s standing a little ways away, his brow furrowed. Alex thinks that her mind is probably screaming, that J’onn knows exactly what’s happened, but for the few seconds that she looks up at him, he just gives her a gentle nod, a _We’ll talk later, whenever you’re ready._

There’s still questions flying over Alex’s head, but she just slumps against Maggie’s chest and presses her ear to Maggie’s shirt, reassuring herself with the frantic beating of Maggie’s heart. Because it’s still there, thrumming away, and Alex can feel her own beating against her ribs. They’re all there, all of them, alive and breathing and well, and when Alex and Maggie finally get home and crawl into bed, Alex falls asleep with her cheek pressed to Maggie’s heart, filling her ears with heartbeats, and she knows that whenever the day comes when they’ll be forced apart, they still have now, and that’s all Alex needs to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got this prompt and I literally used it as a chance to drop in a huge and kind of obvious “supergirl reference” (this can be taken so many ways it’s not even funny) but if you figure out what it is (it’s not subtle at all) then you literally win all the life points (no but seriously, if you do actually know what/who the reference is, then drop a comment or a message on tumblr or something because I'm curious to know)


	3. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where someone requested anything Sanvers and I wrote a high school AU with Pizza Deliver!Maggie that ended up longer than originally planned whoops

Kara doesn’t need to use any of her superpowers to know that her sister has some sort of fascination with the girl who delivers their pizzas on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from anytime between four in the afternoon between ten at night.

Yes, it’s so bad that even Kara knows exactly when Alex is prone to order in dinner for them.

“These are our pizza nights, Kara, we’ve been doing this forever,” Alex will say every time Kara complains about having a pizza craving on any other night of the week. “It’s like how we used to go out to that restaurant you liked on Mondays because kids get all they can eat free, remember?”

Lie. Kara knows that for most of Alex’s life, Eliza and Jeremiah would only get pizza every few weeks, but Jeremiah’s been gone for almost a year now, and the duty of planning meals has started to fall more and more on Alex with every late night Eliza spends at the labs. And Kara knows that if they order pizza on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday, then it’s a pretty safe bet that Maggie Sawyer will be the one who shows up on their front porch with her wide grin and their dinner.

Kara swears she isn’t eavesdropping, that she’s just making sure her sister is okay, but even Kara now looks forwards to the evenings when the doorbell rings and Alex literally drops everything to quickly run her hand through her hair on her way to unlock the front door (Kara’s long since learned to stop racing to get there first, it just means waiting an extra minute or so for food). If Kara’s upstairs, she’ll quietly hover down the top few steps and sit in the middle of the staircase, just out of sight, just able to see the back of Alex’s legs and hear the quiet murmur of a quick conversation and a laugh, sometimes Maggie’s, sometimes Alex’s, and the customary “That’s a lot of food you’re ordering tonight, Danvers, might be more than last week”, “Um, yeah, my adoptive sister, Kara, she eats a lot, so, you know”, or variation thereof, that’s exchanged every time.

That’s normally all there is to their interaction, that short conversation that will leave Alex thoroughly distracted for at least the next half an hour, so Kara’s more than a little surprised the evening she comes downstairs for dinner some ten minutes after the doorbell’s gone off to find Maggie sitting at the kitchen counter, legs swinging from the high stool.

“Hey there, little Danvers,” Maggie says easily, as if sitting in the middle of the Danvers’ kitchen talking to Kara is some sort of regular occurrence.

“Maggie!” Kara says, scanning the room for Alex and almost lowering her glasses to look through the surrounding rooms, but then she remembers Maggie and hastily pushes the frames back up her nose. “Um-”

“Here they are!” Alex says loudly, swooping past Kara to slide a sheaf of papers onto the counter in front of Maggie. “All the notes from last class and the test review.”

Maggie beams as she quickly flips through the ages. “Thank you so much for these, Alex, I swear I wouldn’t have bothered you with these if I hadn’t lost my set. Are you sure it’s okay if I-”

“No, yeah, take them,” Alex says quickly. “I’ve got the whole unit down, I don’t need them.”

“Still, thank you,” Maggie says again, resting her hand briefly on Alex’s arm as she gets off the stool. Alex is still for a few moments as Maggie slips on her jacket and neatly folds the notes away into her pocket before jolting into action to show Maggie to the door.

Kara’s curious, but at the end of the day, Alex doesn’t notice at all when she slips about half a pizza more than she’s normally allowed to have onto her plate, so Kara’s definitely not about to complain or start asking questions.

* * *

Their table at lunch is small and hasn’t really changed since Kara arrived, just the four of them for what feels like forever: Alex and Kara, and Winn (who Kara met in one of her first few weeks there and they quickly fell together in a kind of mutual dorkiness and cleverness, though Alex is pretty sure that the small boy has a gigantic crush on her sister), and James (who had tagged along with Winn, wanting to keep an eye out on the younger boy who hasn’t had anyone else show any interest in being his friend since Schott Senior got locked up). It’s a comfortable group, Alex’s family away from home. Sometimes she misses all her friends from before Kara had crashed into her life, but she wouldn’t change this group for the world. Besides, the more people who got close to them, the higher the chances of someone finding out about Kara, and Alex thinks there’s no one she would ever trust around Kara more than these two boys.

But then there’s Maggie, appearing almost out of nowhere behind Winn to return Alex’s notes, and Alex hates the way she can feel her cheeks grow warm as she jumps and fumbles for something to say and almost drops the notes into James’s lunch as Maggie laughs. Alex finds herself wishing she could control the endless fluttering in her stomach whenever Maggie’s around, because god, she’s never felt like this outside of Maggie’s presence and Alex doesn’t know what to do with herself.

Everyone else is too distracted by Maggie’s appearance to notice how James has fallen silent, observant eyes flicking between Alex and Maggie, until the moment Maggie’s about to go and he finally speaks up with a, “Hey, Maggie, why don’t you sit and join us for lunch?”

“Oh, no, really Olsen, thank you, but I don’t want to intrude or-”

“No, you won’t be intruding at all!”

“Yeah, Maggie, please!”

“It’s no trouble at all, we promise.”

None of them say what they all know, that the alternative is Maggie wandering off to spend lunch on her own, like she’s done every day since she moved to Midvale, and they’ve all noticed what seems almost to be a wariness in getting close to people, despite the fact that most of their classmates are more accepting than the boys on the football team who’d cornered Maggie in the main hallway in the middle of her first week.

Thinking about it makes Alex sad, makes her wonder what had happened to Maggie before she moved here. But maybe, most of all, seeing Maggie looking uncertain in front of her reminds Alex of Kara, back when she’d first started school… back when Alex was too busy being bitter about the alien girl taking up all of her parent’s attention, back when Alex was too busy trying to catch up with her old friends and pretending to laugh when they made jokes about how weird Kara was, and Kara had been left on her own to cope with the new planet and the overwhelming stimulation and had more often than not been found huddled out in the middle of the field alone during lunches by one of the coaches.

The look in Kara’s eyes whenever the office called her in to calm Kara down? Alex doesn’t think she’ll ever forget it, and she’s not sure why but it’s making her uncomfortable to see an echo of that look in Maggie’s eyes now.

“Stay?” Alex asks quietly, nerves fluttering as Maggie turns and meets her gaze. It feel like they spend a small eternity quietly looking at each other, but finally Maggie cracks a small smile and the others whoop as they scoot to make space for Maggie to sit between Winn and Kara.

Alex lets out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding… and does so again, the next afternoon when Maggie strolls up to their table and barely hesitates before sitting down next to Alex.

The day after, Maggie slides into the seat next to Alex in their shared science lab, shooting the tall boy who normally occupies the space a look that sends him scurrying across the classroom without stopping. Alex watches, amused under the fact that her brain has short circuited, and just manages to raise an eyebrow in question when Maggie turns back to look at her.

“We’re light years ahead of this bunch, Danvers,” Maggie whispers, the corner of her mouth tilting up into a mischievous smirk. “We might as well kick their asses together.”

Alex quickly realizes that her small crush on Maggie had been easy enough to handle when she had just been a classmate, barely an acquaintance, but now? The whole thing is quickly spiralling out of control, because Maggie is everywhere now and constantly being invited to join the gang on their various misadventures.

Maggie, running into them at games the gang have gone to so they can keep James company as he captures the action for the yearbook, showing a quiet enthusiasm that Alex relates to, but instantly leaping up with Kara and WInn to cheer as their school takes the game.

Maggie, waiting to meet up with them by the school’s entrance and hang out until they’re almost in danger of being late to class.

Maggie, grinning when Winn and Kara start geeking out over their project in class and showing Maggie their ideas whenever she beats Alex to lunch.

Maggie, more often than not turning down invitations to come over to one of theirs for movies and game nights, but getting thoroughly swept up in the fun of it when she does come, and making Alex swallow hard the night when Maggie casually throws the bottom of her legs across Alex’s lap on the couch.

And then, of course, Maggie, still showing up once or twice a week with pizza, but what’s changed is how they linger for an actual conversation, how Maggie shouts into the house to say hi to Kara and how Kara will barrel down the stairs to stand by Alex and see Maggie off.

Alex doesn’t seem to notice, but before long there’s something… easier about the way Alex goes through her day. Happier. She smiles more, laughs more, gives Winn more teasing slaps on the back of head when they’re joking around, helping Kara hold James’s camera out of reach when the boy gets too focused on his photos to remember to finish his lunch. Kara notices how Alex flinches less whenever Eliza rails on her for the stupidest things, and James sees the girl that he used to pass by in the halls, before Kara had shown up, before Alex’s dad had left.

And Alex always has a wide grin ready for Maggie whenever the other girl joins them.

Alex may not have noticed the change, the way her world’s gotten a little bit brighter, but James, Winn, and Kara sure have, and the three of them exchange knowing smiles over the tops of Maggie and Alex’s heads.

* * *

They’re in school when the call about Jeremiah comes in.

Kara gets to the front office first, thrown off immediately by the sympathetic looks everyone shoots her when before there had only been pity or annoyance about her freaking out again. Kara can’t help but start fidgeting with her glasses as she grabs the phone the receptionist holds out for her.

“Hello?” Kara says quietly, even though she’s recognized the breathing pattern on the other end of the line before Eliza has even spoken.

She’s sure that nobody else hears the small crack of splintering plastic when Eliza finally speaks up, her grip tightening too hard, too much, as her free hand clenches into a fist.

Kara’s face has gone pale by the time Alex finally makes it to the office, her eyes scanning Kara up and down and her forehead crinkling in confusion when Kara looks perfectly fine, save for the fact that the younger girl is staring up at Alex with wide, sad eyes.

“Hey, what is it, what’s the matter?” Alex asks, watching the tears starting to well up in Kara’s eyes at the sight of her.

Kara can’t get the words out, can’t figure out how to tell Alex that her world has just fallen to pieces, can’t process how after losing her entire world, she’s now lost the man who had welcomed Kara into his home with open arms. But it isn’t her place to deliver the news. Instead, Kara silently hands Alex the phone. She wants to look away, wants to find something else to occupy her gaze. Kara doesn’t want to see the look on her sister’s face when she finds out, but she can’t look away, can’t ignore the way Alex’s face crumples for a split second before the walls slam up after he hears that her father is dead.

Eliza isn’t in Midvale, is on her way to go talk to someone about Jeremiah, and there’s no one to come get them, nowhere for them to go. Kara watches how Alex stiffly sets the phone back into it’s cradle, there’s teachers and staff rushing forward to try and herd them into the empty meeting room that they’re welcome to spend the rest of the day in, but Alex turns away from them all, and Kara’s eyes widen when she spots the small trickle of blood running down Alex’s hand from pressing too tightly against the sharp edges of broken plastic that Kara had left on the phone.

“Alex,” Kara says, reaching out, but Alex shrugs her off, refusing to turn and meet her gaze, even as Kara repeats her name with worry, and Alex slips out of the office without another word.

Kara hesitates for a second, glancing uncertainly at the empty room waiting for her, but she can’t contemplate spending the next few hours alone missing a man she’d barely had the chance to know, doesn’t want to leave Alex’s side, and she takes off after her sister. Kara follows Alex through the halls, not quite catching up, and slams to a halt when Alex disappears into her classroom without so much as a backwards glance.

Kara slips her glasses down her nose, watching through the wall as Alex stalks to her seat without a word to anyone. Kara can’t follow her in, and Alex probably wouldn’t appreciate the invasion, so Kara sighs and slides down against the wall opposite the classroom, settling down to wait and watch her sister, and trying not to cry.

Alex stares at the board blankly, her pen drawing tight little circles in the top corner of her notes. She ignores the look the teacher gives her after the phone rings with a call from the office, no doubt. She ignores the boys whispering at the tables behind her. She ignores the little ball of paper that James bounces off her back.

Alex ignores Maggie leaning into her and asking what’s wrong, going “Jesus, Danvers, you’re bleeding”, ignores Maggie reaching over to nudge Alex’s arm with a finger, and ignores how Maggie lets that hand linger for the rest of class.

What Alex fails to do is ignore the image of Jeremiah’s broken body lying on a slab somewhere that’s beginning to form in her mind, the memory of the way he’d kissed the top of her head in farewell before he’d left, the warm smile he’d shoot her over diners to remind Alex how proud he was of her. Alex squeezes her eyes shut, but she can’t force away the memories.

The second the bell rings, Alex is up, is almost running because suddenly she feels trapped and needs to get away from it all right now, but Alex barely makes it more than a couple of steps out of the room before something inside of her breaks and she crumples, and Maggie is the first one there to catch her, half-dragging Alex to the edge of the hallway before she gets trampled by the passing crowd.

“Hey, Danvers, it’s okay. I’ve got you, Alex, I’m here,” Maggie whispers, trying to tug Alex up into her arms because the first silent tears are beginning to fall, and Maggie doesn’t quite know what to do at the sight of one of the strongest people she’s ever met falling apart in front of her, but she also knows that the last place Alex would want to do this is in front of everyone in the school walking by, and that they need to figure something out quick.

It takes James only a few more seconds to catch up to the two of them, taking one look at Alex and lifting her clean into his arm, turning quickly to get them out of the hallway. Alex doesn’t even protest, almost seems to curl herself slightly into James’s chest, but her fingers keep their tight hold on Maggie’s, so that the smaller girl is almost running to keep up with James’s hurried strides. Kara’s a few steps behind them the whole way, overwhelmed by the roar of dozens of talking teenagers and trying hard not to hurt anyone as she rushes after James, desperate not to let Alex out of her sight.

James finds them a quiet, private spot under a flight of stairs in a rarely used stairwell, setting Alex down gently. Kara catches up within a second, Alex choking back a sob the second she sees Kara and reaching out one arm to tug her younger sister to her side, hiding her tears in kara’s shoulder and desperately trying to ignore the part of her brain that’s screaming, This is all Kara’s fault, nothing would have changed, everything would still be the same and dad would still be home is she’d never shown up.

James gets up and leave quietly once he’s sure that Alex has her sister watching over, but Maggie’s attempt to stand is halted when Alex’s grip tightens around Maggie’s hand. Alex lifts her head slightly to from Kara’s shoulder to look at Maggie with wide, vulnerable wet eyes that are almost asking how to cope with this, how to handle this pain, and Maggie’s heart seizes in her chest because there’s no way that Alex knows what had happened to her before Midvale, but that questioning gaze is gone and shifting elsewhere before Maggie can do more than shift closer to Alex.

“He can’t just be gone,” Alex finally manages to choke out, her arm wrapping around Kara so tightly that it would be breaking bone on anyone else. “He can’t, Kara, he can’t.”

Kara squeezes Alex back as tightly as she dares, not knowing what to say, knowing that no words had been able to comfort her when she’d first arrived on Earth, and all Maggie can manage is “It’ll be okay, Alex, it’s going to be okay”, even though she’s as painfully aware as any of them that it’s not going to feel okay for a very long time.

* * *

“How is she?” Maggie asks, peering over Kara’s shoulder and wondering whether it’d be too much to ask if she can step in and see Alex.

“Honestly? I’m not sure,” Kara says, shrugging and looking at a complete loss.

“I’ve seen you coming by class to pick up and drop off her work.”

“I mean, that’s all she’s been doing,” Kara says. “She doesn’t really want to go to school? She just kind of sits at her desk working, and she goes back to bed, and she spends a lot of time avoiding Eliza.”

It’s then that Kara glances down and notices the box in Maggie’s hands. “Um, we didn’t order pizza.”

“No, it’s my treat,” Maggie says quickly, handing Kara the box. “I know your mom’s probably got a million other things on her mind right now, and meals can be hard to keep on top of with everything going on.”

Something in Kara’s face softens and suddenly Maggie’s being drawn into a hug by the younger Danvers sister. She tenses for just a moment before squeezing back, and when Kara lets go, Maggie glances up and just catches a curtain on the second floor moving to cover the window.

“Hey, listen, I’ve got to run,” Maggie says, awkwardly stepping away from Kara. “But, uh, tell Alex… I have no idea exactly what she’s going through, what you’ve gone through, but I kind of know what it’s like to lose a father, in a way, and if she ever wants to talk or anything, you know… I’ll be here.”

And Maggie turns and all but runs back to her bike as the last of her nerve deserts her, getting out of there before Kara has the chance to process and start asking questions.

* * *

“Where’s Maggie?” Winn asks one afternoon, after Alex has come back to school, long after Alex has started relaxing and giving small smiles at Kara and Winn’s jokes and laughing quietly again, but with the new additional of a slight edge to everything she does (and it’s enough of a relief to everyone else that they’re more than happy to deal with this slightly more angry Alex, compared to the weeks when she’d done little more than sit quietly at their table poking away at her food).

And Alex never did get around to having that talk with Maggie.

Alex looks up from her book at Kara’s question, in time to see James glance around the courtyard. She sees the way his eyes narrow as he fixes in on something just over her shoulder, and she blatantly ignores his “No, Alex, don’t” to turn around and find Maggie standing by the doors into the building, surrounded by a half dozen tall boys. Their conversation is barely more than a dull murmur amongst the noise in the courtyard, but Alex can see the defiant glint in Maggie’s eyes even as she spots the way she tenses and her shoulders start to rise defensively up to her ears.

Alex stands up so fast that she knocks her chair over. Kara slams her hands against her ears, startled by the unexpected collision of plastic and metal legs against concrete, and Winn ends up getting knocked out of his seat by James as the older boy leaps up and tries to snag the edge of Alex’s jacket, terrified by the cold fury he’d seen in Alex’s eyes in the split second before she’d stood.

He misses.

Alex stalks across the courtyard, oblivious to James calling her names and Winn and Kara looking on in confusion. None of them had heard what Alex had moments before, but everyone in the courtyard hears the loud “shut the fuck up, dyke” that escapes from one of the boy’s mouths right before Alex grabs his collar, yanks him down to her height, and slugs him right in the face.

The other boys start shouting immediately as their friend goes down, and Maggie is staring at Alex looking thoroughly startled, but Alex completely misses the look because she’s busy directing a furious glare at the boy on the ground. She seems about ready to straddle him and wrap her hands around his throat right there.

Then James is there, swooping in again to grab Alex around the middle and dragging her away from the boy, and, as the bell rings and the courtyard floods with student, he makes the decision to grab Alex’s backpack from Kara and hauls Alex into the crowd and across the campus to their English class.

Kara, Winn, and Maggie stare after them, Maggie letting Kara wrap her arms around her chest and ignoring the fact that Kara can probably feel her trembling.

“What the hell just happened?” Winn finally asks, voicing the question on all of their minds.

It’s definitely the question Kara’s still thinking about later that night as she crawls into bed while texting James one last thank you for getting Alex out of there before she got suspended. Alex is already in bed, completely buried under her covers… she’s been going to bed early these days.

Kara shifts until she’s comfortable and reaches out to turn off the lamp besides her bed. Her head might nestle down into her pillow, but Kara’s eyes never leave the lump across the room that’s Alex Danvers. Kara doesn’t sleep as much as she’s told human girls her age should, and sleep had used to bring nothing but nightmares of home, but now it’s nice to just lie in the dark and silence and relax before lightly dozing for a few hours.

Now, it’s become the perfect opportunity for Kara to keep an eye on Alex and make sure she’s doing okay.

It’s been happening less over the past few weeks, but a few hours later, after Kara’s eyes have finally slipped closed, Alex rolls over in her bed and her shoulders start shaking with silent sobs. The second a small sound slips out of Alex’s mouth, Kara is up and tiptoeing across the room. She’s expecting to have to shake Alex awake, but to Kara’s surprise, there’s already open eyes staring up at her as she pulls back the covers.

“Oh,” Kara says, watching Alex sniffle and sit up to lean on the wall her bed is pushed up against. Kara climbs onto the bed next to her sister, wrapping an arm around Alex and resting her head on Alex’s shoulder. “How are you?”

“Coping.”

“Do you want to talk about him?”

“No, not really,” Alex whispers.

“Okay,” Kara says back. She tilts her head up to watch Alex, the way the older girl blinks quickly a few times to fight back tears, and then stares across the room, eyes focused on nothing. She’s thinking, but Kara doesn’t see any of the signs that are normally present when she’s thinking about her father.

“So,” Kara says after a moment. “Maggie, huh?”

And Alex lets out a strangled mix of a sob and a laugh, and her arms tightens slightly around Kara.

“You like her, don’t you,” Kara guesses. She might not know all the intricacies of Earth culture quite yet, is still trying to slot in the new knowledge alongside her memories from Krypton, but she sees the way Alex sometimes watches Maggie when the other girl isn’t looking, and it’s easy for Kara to recognise it as the same way Jeremiah and Eliza had used to watch each other in quiet moments.

“Yeah,” Alex admits quietly. “Yeah, I just- I do, I think.”

“So why don’t you just-”

“It’s not that simple, Kara,” Alex says, letting her head fall back against the wall.

“But why can’t it be?”

“Because I’m… I’m scared, Kara, okay?” Alex says, a hint of sharpness in her voice. “Because I have no idea what I’m even doing.”

“If you never try something, you’re always going to be afraid of it.”

“And suddenly you’re the wise one,” Alex snorts, giving Kara a little nudge to lie down and yanking the sheets up over them. “I just… I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it if she says no or something.”

Kara rolls over to look at Alex, but even in the dark Kara can see the way Alex’s lips are pressed together, and she knows that the conversation is over.

* * *

“I’m driving to the lab in the city for a meeting,” Eliza says as she presses a quick kiss to the top of her daughters’ heads (both girls know that this is a lie, along with the excuses she’s been making about her loud conversations on the phone since Jeremiah died). “I’ll be back by morning. I didn’t have time for dinner, so I ordered pizza. Kara, please remember to leave some for Alex this time.”

Alex and Kara both miss Eliza walking out the door, too busy turning to each other to share a wide-eyed look. Alex clams up immediately, suddenly realizing that she might be asked to explain her unexpected rampage the day before when, in reality, Alex herself can’t quite wrap her head around the fact that she’d punched someone at school and didn’t even feel remotely bad about it. Instead of thinking more, Alex drops down in front of the television and puts on a documentary, pointedly not glancing at the clock. Kara stares after her for a moment before deciding to leave Alex to it and disappearing up to their room to read.

Kara’s still up there engrossed in her book when the doorbell rings, and habits makes her instinctively sit up and start running to go say hi to her friend. Kara pauses, though, hesitating on the top of the stairs as she hears the front door open, and Kara decides to give Alex and Maggie a moment alone.

Patience has never really been one of Kara’s strong points, though. Kara counts to sixty, trying not to listen to the hum of conversation happening just outside their open front door. Kara gives it another minute, rushing through the count much quicker this time, before scurrying the rest of the way down the stairs. She’s just about reached the door when Kara hear the distinct sound of the bag of pizza boxes hitting the porch, and Kara looks outside to see Alex’s hands resting gently on Maggie’s face as they kiss, Maggie’s hand coming up to cup Alex’s elbow.

For a moment, Kara beams, ecstatic because of how happy Alex looks, but then the younger sibling instinct kicks in and Kara decides that she doesn’t really need to see her sister making out with Maggie Sawyer, so she slams the front door shut and yells “gross!” loud enough that she’s sure Maggie and Alex hear it, followed quickly by a, “My dinner better be okay, Maggie!”

Outside, Maggie and Alex break apart to laugh, resting their foreheads against each other.

“Not what I was expecting when I came over to thank you but remind you that I’m capable of standing up for myself, Danvers,” Maggie teases.

“Hm,” Alex says back. “Better or worse?”

“Definitely better,” Maggie says, leaning in to kiss Alex again. They’re interrupted again by Kara shouting from inside the house, and Alex sighs, bending over to pick up their dinner.

“Best get this in to Kara before she starves,” Alex jokes, holding out her hand somewhat hesitantly. “… join us for dinner, maybe?”

And Maggie grins, quickly interlacing her fingers with Alex’s and letting herself get pulled into the house. “I would love to, Danvers.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks for reading!! I hope you enjoyed this and my ask box on tumblr is always open for prompts and things <3


	4. #SanversWeek Day 1: Intimacy

Alex Danvers has never liked intimacy.

Well.

Obviously, she’s never minded opening her arms to Kara for a hug, or letting Kara bop her on the nose whenever she’s teasing, or letting Kara throw her blanket over her on the couch during movie nights whenever they’re both too lazy to go get another one. But that’s different. That’s her sister. It’s Kara. Kara, who might as well be the only person that Alex had let stay firmly planted in her life since high school.  

Everyone else? Alex would rather shoot their fingers off one by one than let them touch her, let them be close to her, let them know anything she’s thinking other than, “Yeah, I don’t mind you buying me a drink.” (She had minded, though). She’s never liked letting people get that close to her. She had never really liked letting all of those short-term boyfriends, all of those drunk or high or generally questionably-sober strangers into her space, into her apartment, into her life.

But Alex had done it. Alex had done it, because that was what she was supposed to do, what her mom expected from her, what Kara expected to hear on the phone or whenever they checked in for coffee and movie nights and updated each other on their lives. And maybe, Alex had thought sometimes, maybe that was just how it is. Maybe all the movies and books about fireworks and comfort just had it wrong, and that’s what it’s like for everyone. Maybe no one in real life was ever really as comfortable with intimacy as the media seemed to let on – trusting people to get close to you? Hard, when you never really knew who you could trust, when you could never know exactly what anyone was thinking, and besides, the media twisted everything anyways: who could ever really know the truth amongst all the fiction?

Better than the other option, Alex would think, the one where it’s her who’s messed up, her who’s not perfect, her that’s once again going to fall short of everything her mother expects her to be.

So Alex goes out, and she lets guys get close to her, and she tells herself that it’s what she wants.  

Even though she hates it, even though just thinking the word intimacy can sometimes be enough to make her skin crawl.

And then Maggie happens.

Well, Alex guesses that really, girls had happened, but as great as Alex is sure every other woman on the planet probably is, there’s something about Maggie that’s held her attention from the moment they had met, from the first time they’d gone out for drinks, from the first time that they’d played pool and Alex had spectacularly trashed Maggie. And suddenly, Alex finds herself rethinking her entire impression on intimacy, because she’s gay and she has no idea how she’s only just realizing it, how all she needed was a few words from the tiny detective to make all the pieces finally click, but now Alex has a word for what compels her to ask Maggie if she’s free to play tonight, to follow Maggie across the bar to refill her drink even though she could just wait at their table for her to come back.

Alex Danvers has never been able to find a place for intimacy in her life, and suddenly intimacy is all Alex can think about. It’s all Alex can think about, smushed in there in the center of her brain that’s occupied with screaming “oh my god, I’m _gay_ , that’s what this is, what this has always been” and “Maggie Maggie Maggie” about every two seconds. When Alex heads to the bar with the hope that’s Maggie’s there, all she really wants is to talk and call in that drink Maggie had promised. Alex hadn’t really planned to do anything other than maybe bring up the fact that she was into Maggie as more than just a friend, even though she has no idea how to even begin getting those words out.

And it’s Maggie that solves that problem for her, as it is, because Alex was kind of expecting Maggie’s “I’m so proud of you” when she’d told her about coming out to Kara, but she wasn’t expected Maggie to reach out and tug her into a full-on hug, wrapping her arms tightly around Alex, and Alex is pretty sure that something in her brains short circuits because Maggie’s pressed up against her and all she wants to do is hold on, and later, when Alex is hiccuping between sobs at one in the morning, all she can think about is how that stupid hug had led to the impulse for Alex to grab Maggie’s arm and pull her into the kiss, god, she’d been so _stupid_ , Alex knew that her biggest weakness before the DEO had always been letting her heart lead her, and if she’d just kept her hands and lips and her stupid need to get closer to herself, then she wouldn’t have given Maggie the chance to turn her down.

But as much as Alex drinks to try and forget, she can’t force away the lingering thought that kiss had been the first time in her life when that kind of intimacy had felt right.

Twice, then, when Maggie shows up at her apartment after getting shot and pulls Alex into another kiss, and everything feels right, and now Alex can count on two fingers the number of times that she hasn’t had to fight the impulse to run.

And then it quickly reaches that point where there’s no point in counting.

Alex loves pushing Maggie’s hair back behind her ear when it falls in front of her face.

Alex loves it when Maggie casually loops an arm around her waist, fingers stroking the bare skin between her shirt and waistband.

Alex loves pulling Maggie down onto the couch next to her to cuddle through a movie, and Alex loves the way Maggie reaches out over breakfast to swipe jam off the corner of Alex’s mouth, and the way that even the two of them sitting on opposite sides of Maggie’s living room to finish reviewing their separate case files holds a quiet kind of intimacy that Alex had never expected to encounter.

“Okay?” Maggie asks, the first time that their heated kisses had led them to fall into Alex’s bed, the first time that Maggie’s hands shift to push off Alex’s jacket, to linger over the hem of Alex’s shirt, to unfasten the buckle of her belt.

Alex Danvers had thought she would never like intimacy.

But here, in this moment, with a confidently whispered “okay” sounding in the space between them before Alex loops her arms around Maggie’s neck to pull her girlfriend down on top of her so that she can meet her lips in a kiss?

Yeah. This she can get behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm very sleep-deprived so I'm just going to drop this, apologize for another pointless drabble, and go get some sleep so I can write a bombass fic for the Hogwarts AU day lmao


	5. #SanversWeek Day 2: Nerd Girlfriends

Maggie claims that she’s only watching Orphan Black for the gay.

“I mean, how many TV shows will shoot the lesbian and let her _live_?” Maggie says loudly, as though Alex has been aware of the wide spectrum of gay television for long enough to actually be able to provide an answer beyond a small shrug. “True, they could have handled it better, but at least she’s not _dead_.”

Alex buys that for all of about a week or two, until the science starts getting heavy and Alex turns to Maggie to talk about it and notices the way that Maggie’s eyes have lit up in a way that exactly mirrors Cosima onscreen. Alex has to bite back a laugh as she pulls Maggie slightly closer to her, bites back her earlier remark to watch her girlfriend geek out over science.

“It’s weird that Charlotte’s already showing signs of the disease even though in other cases it doesn’t show up until they’re in their twenties,” Alex remarks casually one evening, half because she’s already got a notion about what’s going on and half because she’s curious to see what Maggie’s response will be. Alex knows that Maggie’s good with science, but they’ve never really had the chance to talk before about exactly what Maggie’s familiar with outside what she does with the NCPD.

And, sure enough, Maggie practically jumps in Alex’s arms to go, “She’s cloned from Rachel, Danvers, her telomeres are cloned from Rachel’s, probably when she was already in her early twenties, they’re going to have the same aging signatures.”

“So Charlotte’s DNA is basically older than she is,” Alex finishes, unable to hide her shit-eating grin that Maggie thankfully doesn’t notice because she’s already turning back to the television and mumbling about symptoms and worms and arteries near the brain.

Neither of them notice Adrian on the floor, with a kernel of popcorn in one hand as he stares before rolling his eyes and quietly going, “Can’t even watch a TV show in peace, what a bunch of gay nerds” (not that this will ever stop him from showing up to their weekly OB nights).

Eventually, it kind of expands to more than just Adrian sprawling out somewhere in Alex’s living room where he can watch the show and pretend to make faces at Maggie and Alex cuddling on the couch, because Winn catches wind of it and drags James along, and Kara ends up wondering why no one’s free to go out until someone explains that it’s TV night at Alex’s, and that’s how Kara and Lena end up crammed in with the rest of the superfriends in Alex’s living room, and everyone’s soon there to bear witness to the full science nerd discourse.

“Why does everyone always pull out the damn knife?” Maggie shouts out of nowhere one evening, causing half the room’s occupants to jump, while James just sinks back into the couch looking slightly guilty because everyone knows that he’d just done exactly that a few weeks ago when someone had managed to wedge a pocket knife in through his Guardian suit. “I mean, if I had a dime for every time we showed up to some call about a bar fight or something where someone was bleeding all over because they’d pulled out whatever they’d been stabbed with, I’d be rich.”

“Yeah, but it looks like she was stabbed on the outer thigh? The femoral artery is right there, but it’s more on the inner side, she’ll be fine. Dumb, but fine.”

“Touche, Danvers.”

“Are they always like this?” Lena whispers to Kara, and Kara just laughs and nods and shoots a fond gaze over at her nerd sister and said nerd’s nerdy girlfriend.

And if Alex buys a biology textbook and happens to notice that it’s gone from the kitchen counter and she spots it on Maggie’s desk at the precinct when she’s swings by to help bring Maggie lunch when she’s buried under a mountain of paperwork? Well, she’s not in any place to poke fun at Maggie.

… like that’s going to stop her, though.

* * *

And Alex claims that it’s Kara who’s the musical theatre nerd, and that she’s only ever been along for the ride.

That excuse falls flat on it’s face quicker than Maggie’s about hot French scientists.

Because Maggie’s name is shunted last minute onto a security detail for some politician that’s barely in town for longer than ten minutes, but it entails an hour before hand securing an airport terminal, and waiting around for the guy to get from the plane to his car, and following him across National City to do whatever he’d been there to do, and then back to the airport and waiting around for his plane to be ready to go again. Alex is more than understanding, more than ready to postpone their dinner date and tell Maggie that she can find her at her apartment and that maybe they can watch a movie instead. Still, the second that she’s dismissed, Maggie finds herself rushing back to Alex’s apartment, fumbling with the lock in her rush to get to Alex, to try and makeup for missing dinner, even though she knows Alex is the last person who’s going to hold that against her.

Still, when Maggie finally gets through the front door, the start of an apology is halfway out of her mouth before Maggie notices Alex sprawled out across the couch, hugging a pillow to her chest, hair falling over her closed eyes. And then Maggie notices what’s playing on the television: Alex’s laptop is plugged into the screen, and Maggie raises an eyebrow at the singing going on, and then laughs because not only is Alex apparently a bigger musical nerd than she’d initially let on, but she’s apparently managed to get started on digging out the very gay shows.  

Maggie drops her bag on the floor by the couch, removes her jacket and drapes it carefully over Alex, and crosses the room to the laptop, clicking out of the video and finding the link to it in an email from Kara. Maggie takes note of the show, then closes the laptop, turns around, and debates the odds of her being able to carry Alex to bed without waking her up (or dropping her… which might have already happened on more than one occasion).

Maggie might ask Kara for a list of shows that Alex might like that she hasn’t seen yet, and Kara more than eagerly floods Maggie’s inbox with links to dubiously legal videos of musicals, and plays, and Maggie might just bring them up for Alex to watch, and Maggie quickly learns that there’s very few things that she loves more than the way Alex’s eyes light up at a particularly good number (Alex still will never be as enthusiastic about it as Kara, but a good musical will still make her really happy), and Maggie loves the way Alex beams at the shows where the girl gets the girl at the end.

And Maggie might just surprise Alex by telling her to dress up nice one evening and surprising her with tickets to see the _Fun Home_ tour when it swings by National City, because Maggie remembers the show she’d first walked in on Alex watching and knew that that had to be the first show she brought her girlfriend to. Alex stares at the tickets for a moment before wordlessly pulling Maggie into a kiss that’s way too heated for the sidewalk outside the theatre, before she pulls away and whispers “thank you thank you _thank you_ ” against Maggie’s lips.  

So Maggie follows Alex into the theatre, and Maggie lets Alex take her hand twenty minutes into the show, and Maggie grins when Alex leans into Maggie after ‘Changing My Major’ to whisper, “I’m changing my major to you, Sawyer” against Maggie’s ear, and Maggie leans into Alex when she sees the slight glisten of a tear make it’s way down her cheek in the dim light, and for a moment, Maggie just lets herself rest her head on Alex’s shoulder and look up at Alex’s face, watching the expressions that flit across her face while she watches the show, and Maggie knows that she’s only falling even more for the woman next to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was not my original plan for today's prompt, but I'm still absolutely livid about last week's episode of OB and I needed to write something... positive? regarding it to kind of clear my head a little (update: i'm still pissed but hey). And also: MUSICALS. Two recommendations: Fun Home. Very gay. Very wonderful. Currently touring the United States. There's a production that's set to open in Toronto, I think? And I know that West End is getting it either the end of this year or next year. Also it's on YouTube. Next on the list, Firebringer: this one was filmed by the guys who did it and put on YT so yay it's more legal lmao but I'm pretty sure no one's straight in this show so.


End file.
